Facebook offers greater choice for gender identity

Will Oremus

For years Facebook has offered its users two options for declaring their gender on the social network: male and female. Now there's a third option, or rather, set of options. Choose "custom" from the drop-down menu, and you can select from a list of some 50 options, from "agender" and "androgyne" to "trans female", "trans male", "trans person", and "two-spirit".

Facebook further asks users what pronoun they prefer: "her", "him", or "them". It also allows you to apply custom privacy settings to your gender information, so you can share it, say, only with your friends, or with your friends minus acquaintances.

Facebook now offers more than 50 custom gender identifiers, but the only way to see the options is via a drop-down autocomplete menu.

The company announced the change on Friday, and it appears to be effective immediately.

"There's going to be a lot of people for whom this is going to mean nothing, but for the few it does impact, it means the world," said Facebook software engineer Brielle Harrison, who worked on the project and is herself undergoing gender transformation, from male to female. On Thursday, while watchdogging the software for any problems, she said she was also changing her Facebook identity from Female to TransWoman.

"All too often transgender people like myself and other gender non-conforming people are given this binary option, do you want to be male or female? What is your gender? And it's kind of disheartening because none of those let us tell others who we really are," she said. "This really changes that, and for the first time I get to go to the site and specify to all the people I know what my gender is."

While this was welcome news to LGBTQ advocates, the company did not publish a list of all the options, leaving users to begin typing into an empty text field in order to bring up a drop-down menu of autocomplete choices. The site does not seem to allow users to simply leave the field blank, or to type in a gender identifier that is not among the preset options.

Advertisement

Facebook told me it has no plans to publish a comprehensive list of the choices it offers. So we took it upon ourselves to reconstruct it by typing each letter of the alphabet into the text field, one at a time, and transcribing the options that appeared. We found 56 custom options, bringing the total number of options to 58 including male and female. Please note it's possible that the list below is not complete.

Agender

Androgyne

Androgynous

Bigender

Cis

Cisgender

Cis Female

Cis Male

Cis Man

Cis Woman

Cisgender Female

Cisgender Male

Cisgender Man

Cisgender Woman

Female to Male

FTM

Gender Fluid

Gender Nonconforming

Gender Questioning

Gender Variant

Genderqueer

Intersex

Male to Female

MTF

Neither

Neutrois

Non-binary

Other

Pangender

Trans

Trans*

Trans Female

Trans* Female

Trans Male

Trans* Male

Trans Man

Trans* Man

Trans Person

Trans* Person

Trans Woman

Trans* Woman

Transfeminine

Transgender

Transgender Female

Transgender Male

Transgender Man

Transgender Person

Transgender Woman

Transmasculine

Transsexual

Transsexual Female

Transsexual Male

Transsexual Man

Transsexual Person

Transsexual Woman

Two-Spirit

Facebook has its own post on the changes here, and you can learn more on this help page.